DevOps / Platform Engineer Talent Network

$70–150/hrrate as listed

Mercor maintains a standing pool of DevOps and platform engineers who write, review, and grade infrastructure tasks used to train and evaluate frontier AI models. You apply once, pass an AI-led screening interview, and get matched to projects as labs request DevOps expertise — typically 15–30 hours per week at observed rates of $70–150/hr.

Summary, eligibility guidance and screening preparation are prepared by Sidequest from the platform's posting. Check the source listing before applying.

What the work actually looks like

This is not a single posting — it's an open application to a talent network. Once verified, you're eligible for contracts that come in on a rolling basis from AI labs. The underlying work varies by project, but for DevOps and platform engineering it usually falls into a few shapes:

Task authoring: writing realistic infrastructure problems — a broken Helm chart, a Terraform state conflict, a CI pipeline that passes locally and fails in the runner — with a verifiable correct resolution.
Model output evaluation: reading what a model produced for a pipeline config, IaC module, or incident triage prompt, and judging whether it would actually work in a real cluster or just looks plausible.
Comparative ranking and rubric feedback: choosing between two model responses and writing the reasoning trail that explains why, in terms a non-expert annotator could not have produced.

The hard part is rarely knowing the answer. It's articulating why an answer is wrong — misapplied IAM scoping, a race condition in a rollout strategy, a Dockerfile that builds but bloats or leaks secrets — with enough precision that the feedback is usable as training signal.

What the platform screens for

Mercor's intake is an AI-conducted interview after resume upload and location confirmation. It probes depth rather than breadth: expect follow-ups that push past your first answer on cloud primitives, Kubernetes internals, CI/CD design tradeoffs, and observability. Vague or credential-adjacent answers tend to stall. Reviewers are looking for someone who has personally owned production infrastructure — debugged a bad deploy at 2am, migrated a cluster, argued about blue-green versus canary with real constraints — not someone who has read about it. Written clarity is weighted heavily, because the deliverable is usually prose.

Logistics

Fully remote and largely asynchronous. Typical engagements run 15–30 hours per week, and project duration varies from a few weeks to several months. You choose which invitations to accept. Observed rates for this category sit between $70 and $150 per hour, depending on the client, the specialization required, and your assessed depth — this is a range seen on the platform, not a guarantee. Note the structural reality: acceptance into the network does not mean immediate work, and match timing depends on lab demand.

What they look for

Production experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar)
Hands-on cloud infrastructure work in AWS, GCP, or Azure
Docker and Kubernetes in production, including debugging live workloads
Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) at non-trivial scale
Clear technical writing — able to explain why a config is wrong, not just that it is
Self-directed async work with minimal supervision

Before you apply

Would you pass this screen?

Drawn from what this listing actually requires. Answered in your browser — nothing is sent to us, and we do not store your answers.

Do you have at least 3 years of professional experience in DevOps, platform engineering, site reliability engineering, or a closely related infrastructure/operations role?
Professional DevOps or Platform Engineering experience · required
Have you built, deployed, or maintained CI/CD pipelines and worked with containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, or both) in a production or professional development environment?
CI/CD and containerization hands-on work · required
Do you have hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) in a professional or portfolio context?
Cloud infrastructure experience · required
Are you legally authorized to work as a remote contractor in your country or region, and are you able to provide proof of work location for verification?
Work authorization and location · required
Are you fluent in written and spoken English, comfortable explaining technical concepts and collaborating asynchronously in English?
English communication · preferred

0 of 5 answered

Included with this listing

Interview prep — 11 questions

Matched to what this platform's screening actually measures. Answer each out loud in 60–90 seconds: claim → concrete example → implication.

What it tests: Validates hands-on depth in CI/CD beyond naming technologies; tests whether the candidate can explain architectural decisions and trade-offs, not just recite a resume line.
A strong answer: A strong answer names specific tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, etc.), describes the pipeline stages and why they were ordered that way, and ties it to a real business or reliability outcome—faster deployments, reduced defect escape, safer rollbacks.
Where people lose it: Candidate describes CI/CD at a surface level ('we used Jenkins and Docker') without explaining what the pipeline actually did, why those choices mattered, or what metrics improved. Generic pipeline descriptions signal absence of ownership.